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Getting started

Requirements​

  • PHP 8.1+ — the streaming renderer needs Fibers, added in 8.1.
  • PHPX — compiles the .phpx JSX-like syntax to plain PHP. Installed automatically by Composer.
  • Node + pnpm — only needed to build the example's React island. The PHP side of phpx-server has no JavaScript dependency.

Run the example​

From the repo root:

composer install          # PHP: the phpx-server library + PHPX compiler
composer example:build    # JS: install + build the React island, compile .phpx
composer example:serve    # http://localhost:8080
  • composer install pulls in phpx-server and the PHPX compiler.
  • composer example:build installs the example's pnpm dependencies, builds the React island with Vite, and compiles examples/todo/src/components.phpx to plain PHP.
  • composer example:serve starts PHP's built-in server at http://localhost:8080.

See progressive enhancement for yourself​

Open http://localhost:8080, then reload the page with JavaScript disabled in your browser's dev tools. The app still works: you can add, toggle, and delete todos, and the list still streams in a moment after the page shell. That's not a fallback mode — it's the same PHP rendering path that runs when JavaScript is on. React just layers an optimistic, instant UI on top once it loads.

That one test is the fastest way to understand what "progressive enhancement, not isomorphism" (see Introduction) means in practice.

Use it in your project​

Neither attitude/phpx-server nor its dependency attitude/phpx is on Packagist yet, so both need to be declared as VCS repositories.

Composer only reads repositories from your project's root composer.json — never from a dependency's — so both entries go in yours, even though phpx-server's own composer.json already declares the phpx repository:

{
    "require": {
        "attitude/phpx-server": "^0.1.1"
    },
    "repositories": [
        { "type": "vcs", "url": "https://github.com/attitude/phpx-server" },
        { "type": "vcs", "url": "https://github.com/attitude/phpx" }
    ]
}

Then run composer install.

Once PHPX is published to Packagist, this collapses to composer require attitude/phpx-server.